“The old fellow didn’t answer, but stood looking at the piece of canvas, saying, ‘Only one left. This is the third time.’
“‘Only one fool!’ I cried. ‘How, by Davy, can you read anything on that bit of canvas when it’s as blank as a fog-bank?’
“‘And you are that fool,’ he replied, in a low tone, so smoothly that I damned him fore and aft for every kind of idiot I could think of.
“‘Let him alone,’ said Jackson, hearing the rumpus. ‘All these outlying keepers are as crazy as mollyhawks. It’s some joke, or some fellow’s trying to get the place.’
“In a little while we went aboard the steamer and started for the Falklands.
“I was still there three weeks later, when two small sealing schooners came in and unloaded their pelts. The men aboard them told a strange tale of a wreck in the great hole of the Orkneys. They had gone into the crater after seals and had found a large ship driven into a cleft in the rocky wall. Her bow was clear of the water, but her stern was fathoms deep in it, so they couldn’t tell her name. On their way up they had gone to the westward and come through the Le Maire. They had hunted for two days off the rocks and reported the light out both nights.
“Jackson started off in a day or so to see what was the matter, and he took a goose-gun for that albatross. When he reached the light there wasn’t a sign of those keepers. Everything was in its place and the house was open, but there was nothing to tell how the fellows left.
“In a little while he noticed the head of an albatross peering over the platform of the light, and he tried to get a sight at it. But the critter seemed to know better than to show itself.
“He finally started up the ladder and gained the platform. There were the two keepers, stark and stiff, one of them holding an oil-can in his dead grip. The sight gave him such a turn that when the giant bird gave a squawk and started off he missed it clean, although it wasn’t three fathoms from the muzzle of his gun. He yelled to the men below to come up, but by the time they got there the whole top was afire from the spilled oil catching at the flash, or burning wad, from his gun.
“There was no way to put the fire out, so they had the satisfaction of climbing down and watching the tower burn before their eyes.